Quote:
Originally Posted by CRussel
But suddenly, the price of Ava Lee books has nearly tripled to $11 CAD! They're still eligible for codes, but with no codes more than 50% around right now, that is still annoyingly too much. I was able to get #4 & #5 out of the BC Library, and have a hold on #6, but it looks like I'm going to have to skip #3, or spend more than twice what I'd hoped to spend. Fortunately, I bought #2 last week, before the price hike.
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Do you regularly get freebies via iTunes? It turns out that
The Wild Beasts of Wuhan was an iTunes freebie at some point which I can't recall, so if you auto-click on the iTunes Canada store's Free Book of the Week or the supplementary feature listings which show up on the front of iBooks section page, you might already have it.
Of course, this is kind of a moot point if you don't have an iDevice or Mac with OS X Mavericks to read it on and like me, haven't been able to get the iTunes DRM-removing thingy to work.
I'll note that #3 is actually a pretty important establishing/turning point for one of Ava's soon-to-be-critical work/life relationships, so perhaps you might want to try your local physical library for a copy if reading on paper doesn't give you problems like it does some people.
As for me, I borrowed the library's paper copies of
Ian Hamilton's
The Scottish Banker of Surabaya and
The Two Sisters of Borneo, 5th & 6th in the Ava Lee, Intrepid Globe-Trotting Stolen Money Recovering Forensic Accountant series of investigative (I can't call them "non-murder" any more, as people do sometimes get killed, but it's not so their deaths can be investigated and actually everyone would prefer to pretend that their inconvenient corpses never happened) mysteries.
These two installments continue to build on the complexity and moral compromise hinted at previously in the series. For a few books now, Ava's white-collar crime tracking has led her to intersect somewhat with organized crime which of course has been getting their fingers into such. Another point of intersectionality is with her friends and family (whom she's been using freely as resources for their casual connections with persons acquainted with her clients and/or their access to records and such) having begun to bring in more business to her in the form of more personal connections, and the resulting conflicts that arise.
And thus Ava adds money laundering and bankruptcy/inventory fraud to her repertoire, both of which she now has higher personal stakes in solving than simply professional pride.
I should mention that the stakes are also upped in terms of violence and brutality, as there's some traumatic happenings which I suppose are at a valid risk of occurring, but IMHO are vastly overused for cheap drama in fiction with little attention paid to/follow-up on the usual real-life aftereffects, and which I thus find superfluous and irritating here. Also, I didn't like how one of Ava's potentially difficult action decisions was taken out of her hands via a convenient happenstance which spared her from actually having to follow through with the choice she was going to have to make.
But these missteps aside, once again, these were overall fun and enjoyable looks at the intersection of travel, culture, and shell games with lots of $$$ in them.
One of the things I especially liked is the further development of Ava's relationships with other women. She's always had a close and supportive relationship with her mother and her best friend, but she's recently added a few high-powered professional and personal allies, who are each of them competent yet different, and continues to become more involved with them. It's nice to see strong women depicted who are not all of the same mould, the way that some authors apparently have this view that there's only One Type Of Girl Who Can Hold Her Own With The Boys, or worse, make all the other women behave poorly so their own Designated Heroine can stand out as The Only Decent Female Character.
As for her other personal/professional ties, those undergo further and somewhat surprising changes over the course of these two volumes. Actually, at one point I was kind of wondering if Ava was going to end up running her own crime syndicate (I don't rule it out as a future option), but the books seem to be heading in a slightly different direction than that. For now.
And I really liked the bit in #6 where she goes and hires a local accountant to do the legwork and buried-secrets-digging-up in a jurisdiction where she doesn't have any ties of her own to call upon and he's got the expertise and equivalent connections in his own area to what she normally does. And she also draws back on new connections she'd made back in books #1-2 for further helpful dealings. Yes, form that Justice Legion of Super-Accountants/Bankers/Miscellaneous Law Enforcement Officials! I hope she does this more in the future.
Medium-high recommend for the series thus far, if this is the kind of thing you think you might like. The early novels mostly have appeal due to the novelty value and certain wish-fulfillment-y aspects of the Ava Lee character and her ensuing adventures, and Hamilton certainly has several writing tics which might turn you off (it's probably not as noticeable if you don't read them all in a batch at once, but he does tend to repeat certain things over and over, like the way tha Ava always uses a new Moleskine notebook to record her cases and stores them in a safety deposit box once it's closed, or how Toronto has the very bestest Chinese food in the world ever since the good chefs fled the Hong Kong handover, even better than the other places which have Chinese food in the world, or how Ava's got this perfect physique and power-dresses in Brooks Brothers shirts with modified Italian collars for the important meetings, etc…), but they are overall fun and entertaining if you happen to like the intersection of travel, culture, and shell games involving lots of $$$, with a Modesty Blaise-ish action heroine in them, if Modesty Blaise had been a Chinese-Canadian Catholic (ex-Roman) lesbian debt collector.
But over the course of the past handful of books, the series has grown and deepened in moral complexity and compromise, as well as plot-wise with its increasingly strong interpersonal relationships (and it's nifty to see how certain forms of leverage are invoked to useful effect, though I'm slightly thrown by two Cantonese speakers regularly using the Mandarin term
guanxi in private conversation, though perhaps they're using it because sometimes they're talking about a Mandarin speaker when they use it, or perhaps author Hamilton thinks that the Mandarin term would be more recognizable, or perhaps maybe I shouldn't try to second-guess what Western Anglo authors are trying to accomplish with their slightly inconsistent use of East Asian language terms) and interconnecting case follow-ups, which ups the overall entertainment and enjoyability value of the series if you're planning to get this far in it.
#7 in the series comes out in January and I'm definitely going to place a library hold on it, and when #5 & #6 drop enough in price during a future Kobo sale, I'll also buy my own copies as well, to Support A Canadian Author And Canadian Specialty Independent Small Press Which Survives By Government Art Grants And Sales From Readers Like Me.
Also did a re-read of
Guy Gavriel Kay's based-on-a-true-ish-history thinly-veiled-analoguous-fantasy
The Last Light of the Sun set during the Viking-invaded Anglo-Saxon period of Alfred the Great, which was in a 3-book omnibus edition of his works which I bought recently during another Kobo sale.
I've always kind of liked this book because I have this inordinate fondness for cultures which produce dragon boats, so I liked reading about the not!Vikings.
But I've always also freely admitted that it's decidedly one of his lesser works, and all his writing tics are out on full display here, as he gets very self-indulgent with the switches from past to present tense narration, the little tangential side stories giving the entire future life of minor characters who interact with one of his majors for just a few minutes, the metaphysical mystical musings on the life choices and paths not taken, etc.
Can't really recommend, unless you really want to see thinly-veiled fantasy Vikings in the time of thinly-veiled Alfred the Great, since he's got far better works which should be the ones you should be reading if you're looking to start/continue on his works. But I did still like and enjoy this one, for personal reasons.